Lamprey Festival

Lamprey: Exquisite vampire of the water

An ancestral and tasty fish in large rivers in the province of Pontevedra.

One of the most primitive fish on Earth sails the waters of the Miño river from the ocean to spawn and die. Its gelatinous body and its peculiar circular mouth in the shape of a suction cup could be misleading about its taste, but the lamprey is a prized delicacy that Arbo has been paying tribute to, at the end of April, since 1961. The festival was declared of International Tourist Interest in 2023.

Thousands of legends circulate about this gastronomic relic that already existed 500 million years ago. It is born in the river, migrates to the sea - where it lives at great depths - and goes up the river at the end of its life. The Miño, in the 30 kilometres between Crecente and Salvaterra de Miño, is lined with up to 400 pesqueiras, ancient stone walls with which fishermen catch this jawless water vampire that feeds on the blood of other fish through its suction cup mouth.

The classic recipe is lamprey a la arbense, cooked in an earthenware casserole stewed in its own blood with white rice and toasted bread.

Arbo receives tens of thousands of diners at the end of April to praise this fish which is as ungraceful as it is exquisite. The specimens are caught in a traditional way, and a tag allows the date of the catch and the name of the fisherman to be known. In recent years, traditional recipes have been revived; the main way of cooking it is arbense style, in an earthenware casserole stewed in its own blood with white rice and toasted bread, but there are many more: dried, stuffed, grilled, with snow peas, in pies, with rice, with salad?

The writer Álvaro Cunqueiro, an authority on Galician gastronomy, in his work Viajes y yantares por Galicia (Travels and Dining in Galicia), presents a veritable treatise on lamprey with all the possible ways of preparing it. The Mindonian intellectual claimed that one of the images in the Pórtico de la Gloria tastes a pie of this tasty fish.